Brooklyn Girls Cooking

Sunday, April 6, 2014

I had quite a productive Saturday today. Part of that productivity was taking my bucket and bags of compost over to Added Value (long overdue). This task always reveals the contents of my fridge. It was pretty sparse, but there was the unopened takeout box of rice from Monday. I had kept it on purpose to make something (mostly I've been aspiring to rice balls. yes. rice balls.) but I was kind of pooped, so was on the fence about heating up a lot of oil. I had carrots, celery, and asparagus in the fridge, onion and garlic in the cabinet, and figured fried rice was in order.

Thursday, March 13, 2014

Is it spring yet? Are you tired of everyone complaining that it's not spring yet? Yeah me too.

I say- Take advantage of the cold to partake in the second best cold weather activity- Eating Comfort Food! (first is skiing)

The other day I made a whole mess of pasta. I grabbed everything in my fridge and cupboards that needed cooking or throwing- Carrots, Celery, Onions, Basil, Tomatoes, who knows what else was
there. I cut everything up, and threw it into a saucepan with some olive oil. I added crushed red pepper, some old red wine, and cooked until the vegetables were soft, before pouring in some pasta sauce from the fridge. I boiled a pound of spaghetti, and when that was almost done, added some of the pasta water to my doctored sauce.

As any Italian knows, the best part of bowl of spaghetti and red sauce is 2-3 days later once it has been sitting and marrying for a while. Stop hating on the carbs, grate some parmesan, and enjoy!

Thursday, March 6, 2014

I'm sure you're out there, so hi, happy 2014 and how's everything?
Things are good with me, hectic, but good. But get this, I was at the Red Hook Fairway last night for some quick kitchen restocking, and right as I walked in, my eye was caught by the sign that said 3 lbs of strawberries for 5 dollars.
Wait, is it strawberry season? My mom who's down in Florida says it is there, so I figured what they heyo. They were definitely overripe, which also struck me as a little strange, but I went for it anyway, and bought a whole bunch of strawberries.

Saturday, September 21, 2013

With food, as with fashion, some things are timeless...and some are fads that instantly evoke the era that spawned them. Like, while steak frites is the culinary equivalent of a little black dress and pearls, pesto with sun-dried tomatoes is the equivalent of a pink Izod shirt with a turned-up collar.

Recently, I found myself with a strange nostalgic compulsion to make a circa-late-1970s dish that could be considered the equivalent of a Mrs. Roper print muumuu. And let me tell you, gentle reader, it was damn good.

My aunt—ironically, I'm her namesake—was not much of a cook. She was one of those people that had one “company-friendly” recipe down pat and would make it at every occasion she hosted through the years. In this case, her signature dish was Lettuce Chicken, composed of sautéed chicken, bacon, and—how weird is this?!—iceberg lettuce, with some lemon juice bringing it all together. And it was actually AWESOME—a perfect balance of rich and clean/tart flavors. For some reason, a craving for this popped into my head recently…but when I googled “lettuce chicken” I got a bunch of crap about “wraps” and “cups” calling for lettuce leaves in lieu of the tortillas God intended.

So I texted my mom to ask if she recalled the gist of the original recipe for Lettuce Chicken, and, happily, she did. (Apparently it originated in Gourmet back in the day. If anyone can track down this O.G. recipe I’d be most grateful, and would sleep better at night linking to it as the source of this post. I did do due Google diligence in an effort to cite my source properly…but it’s not my fault that ’Merickan women are obese but aspire not to be, and hence searching for lettuce chicken yields 87 pages of variations on the same freaking “wraps” and “cups”!)

Anyhoo. I originally thought of substituting escarole for the iceberg lettuce as a modern update of the dish, since I just didn’t trust my memory that iceberg could go in a cooked dish. But the Met Foods, much to my lack of shock, did not have escarole in stock, and when I texted my mom to confirm that it was indeed iceberg in the original recipe, she responded, “Yep. That’s all we had back then. AND WE LIKED IT!” Clearly, I had to keep it real and go with the iceberg. (I mean, I didn’t have an option. You caught the part about how the market had no escarole, right?) So, to make a long story short (too late), here’s how I made the awesome lost-in-history dish that is Lettuce Chicken.

Sunday, September 8, 2013

Today starts the most beautiful of
seasons. Yes, I know it's still summer, and the glorious "Autumn in New
York" season hasn't really started yet as we're all crossing our fingers
for more indian summer. What I'm talking about, my cooking gurus, is
football season.

Just like you, friends, as the end of August rolls up, I
get sad, melancholy that the number of immediate beach days is dwindling... Ok, I'm being melodramatic, all I'm trying to say is
that generally, my end-of-summer angst is easily cast aside when
the first official Sunday of Football Season comes around! And that's
today! I am excited!

Saturday, July 6, 2013

Hope everyone is having a rip-roaring birthday celebration for good old 'Murica. Being the increcibly lucky lady that I am, I headed up to Cape Cod a few days ago to spend some time with my family, and got to participate in one of my favorite past times- Fishing! Not sure if fishing is the most patriotic activity, but it's Cape Cod and it's a day on a boat, who can say no to that? It wasn't the most productive day of fishing, but we caught 1 big one, and when it comes to dinner, that's all that matters, amiright?

Tuesday, May 28, 2013

Now, everyone knows that if you go out in the sun at the start of the summer season, you’ve got to build up your sun tolerance and gradually establish a base tan—if you go from an entire winter indoors to an entire day in the sun, you will get badly burned. Well, gentle reader, this fail happened to me over Memorial Day weekend, except with meat. Basically, I got carried away by grilled-meat excitement at the start of BBQ season (including one of Miss Alyce’s lovely rooftop affairs) and did not consume a single other food group (unless you count beer) for two days. It turns out that’s a bit much even for a carnivore like me. This is why I, of all people, came to prepare roasted broccoli as a one-dish meal.

I brought home a nice bunch of broccoli purchased from my new boyfriend Mr. Melon, and preheated the oven to 425°. (This would be the silver lining of the temperature vacillating 20 degrees every other day lately—it most certainly doesn’t feel like the start of summer right now.) I trimmed the bottoms off 4 of the broccoli stems, peeled the fibrous outer layer of skin off the stalks, and sliced each into quarters.